There’s this modern affliction where people believe they are morally responsible for the actions of every person they buy anything from.
For your own sanity, please let this go. You are responsible for your own actions. If you buy a pen from a psychopath and he uses the money to buy a bullet and shoot someone, that’s not your fault. He’s responsible for his actions.
It’s like everyone somehow forgot that other humans are sentient beings with their own agency. Main character syndrome run amok.
you can be pragmatic and choose not to buy from certain companies whose behaviour you consider egregious, while at the same time not having to worry about each single expense you make.
Deciding what bank you will get your home loan from -> not something you do every day, it's ok to do some research
Deciding what cafe you will get your next lungo from -> not worth your time
Isn’t that the same as “just avoid things you’re morally opposed to as time and energy allows”? Why even bother with taking a moral stand if you only do it when it’s convenient?
I feel the same. It may be because it's easier to feel virtuous by not buying a company product than to actually be virtuous by going out doing virtuous things.
Giving up something you'd otherwise enjoy or find convenient because it would indirectly bring harm to other people feels a very virtuous action to me. I wish more people (including me) had the ability to do that more.
Yes, you are morally responsible for your own actions. But those actions don't happen in a vacuum. They happen in a world that you are able to observe and make predictions about, however imperfect those predictions are. If you don't know that you're enabling the shooter, sure. But if you do know and do it anyway, you are responsible for knowingly enabling the shooter.
This doesn't mean that the shooter doesn't have his own agency and his own responsibility for his actions. It just means that his responsibility for his actions doesn't diminish your responsibility for yours, even if your actions involve him.
It seems to be a common idea that we can just overlook the abuses committed by the other people we deal with, as things "I'm not responsible for", regardless of our actual ability to do something about them. I have no special insight, but I think it's a common idea because it lets us feel better about ourselves while we do nothing. But "feeling good about oneself" isn't a solid way to build or evaluate a moral framework.
Wrong. It's not about morality (or "main character"), it's about caring for your own and your beloved ones current and future.
Ignorance, apathy and indifference keep the buyers/consumers/followers encouraging the unhealthy yet very "focused and efficient" morons (big and small) to ruin the world for everyone while they accumulate enormous power to further abuse the rest.
__If you buy gold from someone who poisons a river (to extract the gold more "efficiently"), soon your whole forest will suffer from deceases and degradation.__
You may feel tiny and powerless but it's sane and healthy to care for the whole ecosystem and think about aftereffects of everyone's actions.
wrong about wrong. if you go down that path, you are powerless. we live in a society that is imperfect. but you cannot live on a pedestal alone and be perfect either.
you should shop at "walmart" or where-ever your dollar is the most effective. and that gives you the most stability and and position to challenge whether the current Walton regime's love of China is a good thing or not. but cutting your nose off to spite your face does nothing useful.
Right, and you posted this reply because you do care that others in the forest know that you deem something "wrong" (actions or ideas) and maybe there's a healthier way to pursue (while reminding to have realistic expectations). The river starts with many single drops gravitating to go somewhere )
We have a government to enforce laws to protect the commons. If someone is poisoning the river, the government should fine them and shut them down. They should be inspecting gold producers to make sure they are complying with regulations so that all gold is produced in a sustainable way that doesn't destroy the environment.
If that's not happening, then we need to fix the government so it does happen. Expecting each individual person to be their own EPA and research how every single item they consume is produced idiotic and doomed to failure.
Governments are pushed to do things to protect people by the people. Seat belts were not a thing (i.e., required by law) until there was sufficient public pressure to make them so. Heard of Ralph Nader? Food is made in unsafe conditions and governments are fine with it until there is pressure - have you ever heard of "The Jungle"?
Yeah, that's the theory, and by any mean we definitely need to pursue that as well. I wish we had the luxury of making it work on its own. But since we do not, we need to pull all the levers we have, not just one.
> Expecting each individual person to be their own EPA and research how every single item they consume is produced idiotic and doomed to failure.
That's a false dichotomy. There are many middle grounds between researching every single item you buy and dropping the problem as a whole. You can focus on items which are most likely to bring negative impact, you can draw information from journalistic reports and material produced from dedicated associations. There are many ways to be sensitive to economic externalities of the things you buy without getting insane and without considering the whole problem moot on general phylosophycal principles.
Your purchasing decisions are one of the more significant ways you impact the world and it makes sense people want to be cognizant of how they are effecting other people.
Though I recognize depending on people's mental health it can be stressful to think about and if you can't then it's okay, one of my friends in particular was worrying about what she was buying to the point where it was a significant source of stress in her life and that wasn't good (though therapy for her general anxiety helped a ton so she's now concientious about what she buys while not stressing over it. It took her a while to get there though).
It makes sense if consumerism is your only connection to human society.
It is a form of trained helplessness to fixate perpetually on consumption.
If someone wants to do good in the world, go out and do it. help someone for real. I think it is lack of real connection that leads people to navel gaze about the third order consequences of their clothes or software.
I think this substack [1] summed it up perfectly:
>I was 16 when I realized I had to kill myself. I was in a Denny’s with my friends, looking at an empty glass of Diet Coke. The glass was produced by taking the raw resources of a foreign country, exploiting its workers in horrible factories, and sent to me to drink out of. And I didn’t really have any other option for getting liquid from a nearby water source into my body, it had to travel through moral atrocity along the way. It wasn’t just one glass, of course. It was everything. It was the shoes I was wearing (shoes were a big deal in those days) and the flooring I walked on and the food I ate. The only moral act was to kill oneself, and failure to do that meant you accept your role as a vicious monster. (The depression helped, but maybe the depression/guilt causality was reversed.)
IMO you're pretty right on this front. A lot of the folks I see most concerned about consumption are the folks who have the hardest time engaging offline. I suspect a lot of these folks feel anxiety in interacting with a physical community and find consumption to be one of their main connections to the world around them.
No, they are one of the laziest, most do nothing ways.
Right now in your community are tons of organizations looking for people to actually help.
I've restored nesting habitat for endangered birds. And I just happened to be able the beach when volunteers came around. That did more than stressing over what I bought ever did, and it was just hanging out at the beach. There are orgs for driving people to medical appointments. That can be an amazing impact on someone's life and on yourself (more than buying the right ketchup).
Make yourself financially strong so that you can help others. Sacrificing your money to make a point is wasted virtue signaling.
I mainly see people who shop correct/rescue animals as the most minimal helpers who want to feel they are helping. There is an old woman dieing crying in your town right now because she's overwhelmed and doesn't know how to get to an appointment she needs. An no one cares. But if I buy the right ketchup, that matters? If I drive 2 hours to save a dog (while the old woman dies crying and alone, unable to get to the doctor, a 15 minute trip) I'm a good person?
You don't know up front what's going to happen. Seeing the future is not an ability humans have. Unless the pen is being sold as part of some murder fundraiser and you're going out of your way to specifically buy it there than from any better options the person doing the murder is the one responsible for the murdering.
If that's the rebuke then the whole comparison is silly. Since if you buy clothes at some chain like Zara you know before hand what the conditions are which they impose on their workers. You don't need "future sight" for that.
You personally know the conditions? You know that the workers would be better off not having the option of working in the Zara factory? I don't mean a choice between working for Zara and a hypothetical fantasy option of them working in an office with 40 hour work weeks and air conditioning, I mean their actual other option like subsistence farming or whatever they did before there was a Zara factory. You feel you are more entitled to make that choice for the workers than they are themselves?
> You think I can only understand the conditions if.. what? I've directly worked at the factory? Published a peer-reviewed study?
When do you think you understand the conditions? When you watch a TikTok video about it? When you read an artistic the Atlantic? When you watch a segment 60 minutes?
I guess I’m unclear why you don’t want to answer what I thought was a fairly simple question. Being evasive just looks like doubling-down on the dishonest way you’ve approached the entire conversation.
The example is deliberately contrived and hyperbolic. In real life, if there is reliable evidence that someone is murdering people, the police conduct an investigation, we have a trial, and they go to jail. You know what we don't do? We don't go "Hey, I think Bob the pen-seller is a murderer. Nobody buy his pens so hopefully he runs out of money and can't afford to murder people anymore". We don't do that because it would be a really stupid and ineffective way of stopping murderers, and it's really stupid and ineffective for most other things too.
Yes. If you determine a Tesla is the best car to fit your needs, there are far better ways to influence Elon's actions than depriving yourself of the best car for you. You could write your Senator / Congressperson to support laws that would curtail Elon's actions. You could speak publicly and propose better things than what Elon is doing or publicize how and why they're harmful, etc. Buying or not buying a Tesla is very unlikely to influence Elon at all.
Also consider: There are thousands of employees at Tesla and thousands of shareholders. Do you also need to individually vet every one of their opinions before you enrich them by buying a Tesla? What if they don't all have the same opinion? Are you supposed to take a poll and go with the majority? This is silly.
> Buying or not buying a Tesla is very unlikely to influence Elon at all.
But it can certainly influence other people's perception of you... I think what we all have to decide though is how much that matters to us, should we decide to buy one anyway.
> Do you also need to individually vet every one of their opinions before you enrich them by buying a Tesla?
I think most people's negative image of a company/project tends to come from the leadership, or the most public leader, and not all the individual employees.
To that end I would consider Linux to be a tool mainly led by a habitually emotionally abusive person (Linus). Or when people mention Kitty I point out to them Kovid's many personal attacks on end-users, etc.
For some reason a lot of people in tech (and probably everywhere) seem to have real issues with staunch dogmatism and god complexes. I know people make mistakes and that's fine, but I'm talking about the ones that show consistent and daily life-long problems with usually no remorse.
You don't know everything, none of us do, and there can actually be other valid perspectives if you allow yourself to be wrong occasionally. Definitely not enough introspection/self-reflection going on IMO.
I'm sure people will downvote this but I don't think people should be forced to (or shamed when they don't want to) separate the art from the artist.
> But it can certainly influence other people's perception of you... I think what we all have to decide though is how much that matters to us, should we decide to buy one anyway.
Yes, this is a concern, and it's a direct result of the phenomenon I'm talking about. There are violent, stupid people who will attack you because they think that buying a product means you endorse every political opinion every person who made that product ever had.
I'm actually looking to buy a car soon, and I've considered this in regard to Tesla. Do I want to deal with having my car keyed or painted or set on fire because of what someone thinks about Elon? Do I want to potentially put myself or my family in danger because someone thinks that attacking a random Tesla consumer is the best way to effect change in the world? And, frankly, no, I don't. But that's what I'm talking about. If you find yourself attacking strangers or destroying their property because you disagree with the politics of some CEO the person you're attacking has never met, you are in fact the bad guy.
I agree with you, up until the point that CEO is a verified Nazi. If you see a man give multiple Nazi salutes behind the presidential seal, and your response to that is to hand over your money to him, are you a good or even neutral person? Not in my eyes, sorry. We have to have some standards in this society. Look around, fascism is flourishing. What you are doing now is what you would have been doing as a German in the 1930s.
The defining characteristic of Nazis is authoritarian megalomania, something Musk has in spades. The hand gesture is how they identified themselves and professed their allegiance to the cause, something Musk has adopted. He's telling us who he is, we should listen.
The gas chambers are their most horrific deed, but Nazis were still Nazis before they gassed anyone. Therefore gassing does not define them.
The key to stopping Nazis is to do so before they get the gas chamber stage. If you let it get that far, you're too late. So you have to rely on other clues.
Nazi salute are about as oblique as you can get. They should have been a wakeup call.
>If you determine a Tesla is the best car to fit your needs, there are far better ways to influence Elon's actions than depriving yourself of the best car for you.
As if "having the best car for you" is some sort of moral imperative or necessity, as if buying a less luxury vehicle is some sort of unthinkable option.
>You could write your Senator / Congressperson to support laws that would curtail Elon's actions.
Ah yes, tell the government that supports elon and that elon is part of to simply not do those things. Surely that is a workable option right now!
You can vote for a different government. You can even campaign for a different government, or run for office yourself. It's this whole system we created for the people to control the government directly instead of changing buying patterns and hoping 18 levels away someone figures out you're trying to tell them to change a policy.
I would buy a "tool" that solves a problem significantly better than its competitors, but I usually ditch options that are marginally better o cheaper if I feel a personal moral conflict.
Just to honour the Godwin law, take the Eduard Pernkopf anatomy manual as an example, a fascinating example of this discussion.
There is always a tipping point where practicality beats purity, and I think it's ok trying to stretch it, respecting other's choices in the way of course. No need to judge.
I think it's more rational to fuss about buying a Tesla than about buying a Windows license for a few reasons:
* It's a heck of a lot of money to send to any company, so it makes more sense to pause and consider what you're funding. I can't put that much effort into every <$100 purchase without going crazy.
* Tesla is far more about Musk than Microsoft is about... whoever runs Microsoft these days. There's a very specific person tied to it.
* Driving a Tesla is seen by the world as a statement of some kind in a way that running Windows simply isn't. It's worth considering if that's a statement you want to be making.
I would. With some modification. If it was cheapest vehicle on market that meets my needs I would probably buy it. But it is neither cheapest or gas...
This individualistic attitude is how we got to our current situation, and why we are perpetually stuck here. Everyone in any position of corporate power is a psychopath, because the system will replace them if they are not. Every purchase you make has the downstream effect of encouraging whoever you bought it from to continue doing what they are doing. And, what everyone is doing is "throwing everything possible (morally, ethically, and legally) under the bus to grow profits." Individuals don't get to dodge culpability just because we are only indirectly funding all this bad behavior.
Absent government will (which has been the reality for decades), we have no way of stopping this bad behavior than to stop funding it. But since nearly every company is engaging in bad behavior, "stop funding it" means becoming a hermit and not buying anything, which is also not feasible for enough people.
Becoming only consumers is how we got here. We are no longer citizens, no longer members of religion, no longer anything but consumers. Hiker/biker/crafter/music maker...so much around the scene is consumption. So all we see is consumption. To the point that making the tiniest movement in consumption is the only impact we can possibly imagine. Every good company sells out in the end. You aren't making a difference, you are building someones brand.
Don't play that game. You aren't a consumer you are a human being. Today you can impact for the positive. Choose your shopping based on savings/health, and invest that money into your local foodbank or helping someone at something like Kiva.org (I don't keep up, is Kiva bad now?) or other local charities where you can actually have an impact.
It's crazy how people have been convinced to give up and do the most barely needle moving things to feel moral.
There are these child-sized shopping carts at the grocery near me with a flag on them that says "customer in training", and it's one of the sickest most obscene thing I can think of. Because it's true, we train our children to be good consumers better than we train them to be good citizens. And it shows.
I feel the opposite. I feel I am responsible if I know the psychopath will use the money to buy a bullet and shoot someone.
I think what you're not realizing is that most people don't care. They don't care and they don't think about it. They just scaffold really weak logic to justify the whole thing and then go about their day. So when you ask them they have convoluted reasoning why they're ok with it. This blog post is that convoluted reason.
Ultimately the real reason is that we just don't care.
Most people think the comparison to an actual killer is hyperbole. These institutions are flawed, not evil.
(And if you’re going to jump in the comments about them being evil, check your privilege. None of these tech companies operate literal death squads as several non-tech companies did as recent as a few decades ago, and probably still now.)
Hmm, this doesn't track with history. Boycotts, and more generally collective economic action (strikes, etc), are an incredibly powerful form of protest. People have shaped the world through refusing to buy from oppressive forces - case in point, the boycotts of South Africa during apartheid successfully pressured South Africa out of apartheid. We got our collective rights as workers (40 hour work days, etc) through strikes, boycotts, and more.
It's not easy, but if you're serious about it is best done in community, with support and strategy. So, the opposite of main character syndrome, I would say.
It's also very odd that you take an analysis that is fundamentally systemic and translate it into purchasing from an individual psychopath - under what assumptions is that a valid comparison, one with any merit? It's not like corporations exist in a vacuum, only to emerge from the void to casually sell a single pen, the money with which they use to buy a single bullet. We as individuals, as communities, exist in feedback with the systems that we are a part of, including (surprise) corporations. So, yes, we have power to shape them, though (again) not easily.
Boycotts are a different thing. A successful boycott targets a specific company about a specific issue that that company has the ability to change. When the company changes the thing, the boycott ends.
The bus boycotts in the US Civil Rights movement are a good example. "Hey bus company, we're going to stop riding your buses until you end your racist seating policies". It's clear what they wanted to happen, and it was in the power of the boycotted company to make that happen.
This new thing is something else. Just a general "don't buy from this company because ... uh ... vague noises about evil". Like, what is it exactly you want this company to do? How will you not buying from them force them to do that? Do they even know what you're asking for?
This is not about trying to effect any sort of change. It is just plain virtue signalling so you can appear righteous to others. There is zero chance of anything happening in the world because of this.
Sounds cynical. Sure, people are not organized. They lack strategy and insight. It takes time to get there.
Sure, there is definitely a performative thing out there, and maybe this is that.
My point is this - now is a time when we need more collective action, not less. So, rather than taking up space putting down someone who may simply not know what the next step is, why not give the world the energy that it so desperately needs? Now is a time to encourage people. What you (yes, you) put out in the world matters.
The specific boycott is against Tesla, and the specific issue is Elon Musk's wealth. The objective is to bankrupt him by bankrupting Tesla until Musk is gone. The only acceptable future Tesla has is a future without any financial ties to Musk.
> There is zero chance of anything happening in the world because of this.
So far we've accomplished a 71% drop in profits, and we aren't letting up. This has caused him to turn tail from DOGE and to cry on his earnings call about it. We are having an impact, and it is impacting Musk's and Tesla's behavior.
Sure, I am responsible for my own actions, and buying something is an action I (can) make. Therefore I bear responsibility for the side effects of my buying actions. Not the same kind of direct responsibility of those that directly make bad actions, and I don't think I should become insane over evaluating the impact of every single thing I buy, but there's a middle ground between that and ignoring the side effect of anything you buy.
There's a better viewpoint on that, though: ignore moral responsibility, think in terms of agency. Choosing from whom you buy is one of the few ways you (as an ordinary citizen) have to make the world a little steer towards a better form of itself. My own choice alone won't change much (which is correct, otherwise we'd be in an economic dictatorship), but if many people consistently care about that capitalism will work its magic and make wonders happen.
For your own sanity, please let this go. You are responsible for your own actions. If you buy a pen from a psychopath and he uses the money to buy a bullet and shoot someone, that’s not your fault. He’s responsible for his actions.
It’s like everyone somehow forgot that other humans are sentient beings with their own agency. Main character syndrome run amok.